Breathing Through the Wound

by Victor del Arbol

  The opening was no more than a meter and a half squared, give or take. It was very dark, and he couldn’t see the bottom or sides; all he saw was the top of a ladder hanging down. It looked like the entrance to an underground bunker. Perhaps it was another storeroom that Dámaso had stopped using years ago.

  Feeling his way through the dark like a blind man, using his lighter, Guzmán finally found a light switch. He flipped it and heard an electric buzzing.

  Guzmán let out a low, admiring whistle.

  It wasn’t a storeroom, garage or tool shed. The walls were insulated with natural fiber, and from the ceiling hung small gooseneck halogen lamps. In the center of the room were two dozen red, comfortable-looking theater seats with cushioned backs, and in front of them a huge screen with an overhead projector and DVD player. This was a screening room, a private movie theater. So the old man had lied, and this was where his lie began: it must have been the meeting place for the film club Olsen’s wife had told him about.

  In a display case stood a near-identical copy of the first projector to be manufactured by the Lumière factory in 1895. Beside it was a metal box with several of the films first shown in Lyon the same year, shorts that lasted no more than ten minutes: Le jardinière, L’Arroseur arrosé, La Sortie de l’usine Lumière de Lyon. They must have been worth a small fortune. Maybe the old man was naturally distrustful and wanted to keep it a secret so he wouldn’t be robbed. The people who met there must have been a very select group of collectors, bon vivants who delighted in being able to enjoy their marvels in private. It wasn’t unusual for the rich to pay astronomical prices to be able to enjoy works of art privately. Often they were anonymous, people who sent employees to auctions to bid for them, so they wouldn’t have to show their faces. There had even been cases, much discussed in the media, of very important people who’d bought art stolen from museums or other places, just so they could have the exclusive privilege of owning whatever they wanted. Maybe that’s what got those freaks off, Guzmán thought, scanning the room slowly—having what no one else could have. Maybe.

  But there was something that still didn’t add up. He didn’t know what it was, but it was there, in plain sight, challenging him, waiting for him to put the pieces together.

  Bosco had always advised him to have patience when he started a “file.” That was what they called them at the National Intelligence Directorate, rather than cases or investigations. By the time the “files” reached his hands it was never a matter of discovering some hidden truth. They didn’t need proof, didn’t have to follow clues or pretend to be cops, detectives you read about in novels. They weren’t there to waste time. They were there to crack their “files”: get confessions, names, dates and addresses. Signed statements, admissions of guilt. As far as DINA—the directorate—was concerned, no one was ever innocent. Ever. They were all guilty of whatever they’d been accused of, even when they hadn’t formally been accused of anything. They didn’t go into the basement cells of La Moneda palace in the hope of a fair trial or some improbable absolution. Anyone who fell into the hands of Bosco and his team of interrogators (they didn’t like to use the words “torturers” or “executioners”; that reduced the importance of their work) was going to confess their guilt. Their “file” was going to be closed and sent to the archives. And still they had to be patient: ponder the use of force; set the stage of terror; decide whether to play it nice or be hard; find a crack in the prisoner’s resistance; spend day and night searching, for days, weeks, months (no one had ever held out more than three months) until they found it.

  The weakness could be a childhood fear (he himself had been afraid of dogs ever since the time, as a boy, he’d seen his brother ripped apart by a wild pack, while they were combing through the debris at the dump south of Santiago); it could be a son or daughter, a husband or wife, a father or mother. It could be wounded pride, vanity, fear of betrayal or being denounced by colleagues. It could be sexual humiliation, lack of affection, anything. And when they discovered it, when they got a whiff of the weakness, that was it. That was when they pounced, merciless until they’d reached all the way to the bottom of the prisoners’ very souls. Then they got everything, hollowed them out and then delivered their bodies to the grim reaper—and a common grave.

  “What are you hiding, you old bastard? What are you keeping from me?”

  The time had come to change tactics, Guzmán decided. Spain might not be Chile in the days of the Pinochet junta, might not even be the Spain of the GAL—the so-called Antiterrorist Liberation Groups, which were really death squads fighting the forces of the separatist ETA. But men were still men, and they still reacted to the same stimuli. And he still had contacts, people who owed him favors, feared him, and just a few who actually held him in some regard. He might not be an orthodox cop, or even a typical private investigator. He wasn’t Mr. Clean or Dirty Harry. He hated those clichés. Guzmán was something else. Something they’d never seen in Spain. And the feeling that he didn’t have everything under control annoyed and frustrated him. So he was going to fix that.

  * * *

  —

  On the second visit—unlike his first—Guzmán got the impression that Olsen’s widow’s house was rather ordinary, that the sea was too far away and the sun blazing down on the limestone facade just foreshadowed the wasteland that the entire planned community was no doubt destined to become. There was no sign of the two attractive, rosy-cheeked, IKEA kids or the hysterical yapping Yorkie. It was all quiet.

  Guzmán walked into the backyard. He could see Olsen’s widow lying on the sofa, flipping through a fashion magazine. He got her attention by rapping on a window with his knuckles.

  She looked up, and on seeing him her whole face tensed. Visibly displeased, she got up and opened the sliding door.

  “What do you want now?” Her expression made it clear that she thought she never should have let him in the first time.

  She had beautiful eyes, Guzmán thought.

  Maybe her eyes were what Magnus Olsen had first fallen for, at one of those exclusive parties thrown at some embassy where those who make it past the red cord know they belong to a select group. Maybe the widow had been practicing that look in the mirror for years, waiting for the right moment to use it, the chance to escape the Stockholm slum where her beauty fetched nothing but obscene remarks from Turkish and Armenian louts, who watched her walk by like some sort of extra-terrestrial, a diamond in a pigsty.

  “I thought we should finish our conversation.”

  She looked away in irritation, her face seeming to say that no one is ever satisfied with what they’ve got, that everyone always wants more.

  She looked lovely in her designer top and tight pants. Maybe she’d had to borrow money to buy her first dress; who knows what it cost her to finance that very first outfit. She must have managed, though, and maybe managed to hide the fact that her heart was racing when she found herself in some Versailles-style palace with frescoes on the walls and ceilings, surrounded by crystal chandeliers that reflected the light off her fake jewels. No doubt she’d had to force her hand not to tremble when the waiter offered her a champagne flute, had to force herself to sip it slowly, as though she’d been doing it all her life, attending these parties where upmarket hookers dressed in style, on the hunt for a golden retirement plan.

  “You’re just not going to leave me alone, are you?”

  She glared at Guzmán but the disdain she felt was for herself—a life of swallowing humiliations, like a trained monkey on a leash that might be jerked by the master at any moment, a trophy to be flaunted before friends and enemies, an exchangeable good. “Wear the low-cut dress; the minister likes your tits,” “smile at the bank manager; he wants you to suck him off in the backseat of his Mercedes and we need him to approve a loan for millions.”

  Eyes like hers—eyes devoid of dreams—had tried many times, in many places, and with little luck, to
touch Guzmán’s heart.

  “The day your husband committed suicide—what happened?”

  “What kind of question is that?” she asked. Her lassitude had morphed into an expression of disgust.

  “The kind that’s got an answer. I can pay for that answer, or I can make a few calls so that all those friends, the ones who are tearing what’s left of Olsen’s estate to pieces, find out that this house is in his widow’s name. Times are tough in real estate, but I reckon they could still get a few thousand euros if they evicted you. And believe me, banks aren’t a whole lot more compassionate than your husband was, so the sight of those little blonde angels of yours won’t do much to melt their hearts. So: a check with a few zeros on it, or an eviction notice—your choice.”

  Olsen’s widow made no attempt to suppress her disgust and scorn for Guzmán. He accepted her look stoically, waiting until she realized that expressions of pride are useless when you’re in no position to make demands. She stroked the wrinkle creasing her forehead with an index finger and then rummaged in her purse for a pack of cigarettes. Guzmán thought he saw something metallic; it looked like a pistol. Maybe she had opened her purse in search of a smoke, but he couldn’t discard the possibility that she’d done it as a warning, so he would see her weapon, the implication being that she knew how to defend herself and was prepared to do so. Guzmán was unimpressed. In order to intimidate someone, a threat is not enough.

  “Lately we’d hardly seen each other. Everyone assumed we took off, went to Stockholm—but I can’t go back there. My husband’s company used me as a front for some of their deals and the police would arrest me the second I set foot in any territory of the Swedish crown. That’s just one of the reasons I hate him. We were hardly sleeping together anymore, and I spent much more time here than at our Madrid apartment.”

  “But the night he committed suicide you were all in Madrid together.”

  “He’d called me the day before. Said he wanted to see me and the kids, but didn’t say why. He never gave explanations, just expected his orders to be carried out, immediately and without question. So I took the kids to the apartment in Serrano. The problems had already begun with his firm in Sweden—tax inspections, accusations of fraud and embezzlement—and I’d gotten used to the way he’d aged and become taciturn, irascible. He was quickly destroying himself, the man who was always so proud of having made it out of the gutter by his own wits, having tripled his fortune in a few short years. It was all slipping out of his grasp. And he couldn’t stand it. But that day he opened the door and greeted us, and he was like a new man. Maybe not the one I’d first met, but at least a faint reflection of him. He was euphoric, confident, had the same ravenous expression he used to have. He told me he’d found a way out of his legal and financial troubles. ‘A trump card just fell into my hands,’ that was what he said. He promised me everything would go back to the way it had been, in the good old days. Even though we could never return to Sweden, we’d start again here, then Tarragona, then Málaga, and then Murcia…He’d build another empire from nothing. And I believed him,” she concluded bitterly. “I had no choice but to believe him.”

  “That trump card, did he tell you what it was?”

  She looked as though she’d just been caught in a crossfire in no-man’s land, no barricade to hide behind.

  “No, he didn’t tell me. He never told me anything, and I didn’t need—or want—to know about his schemes.”

  Her reply was as obvious as it was disheartening. But Guzmán hadn’t come to ask questions he knew wouldn’t be answered. He’d just been feeling her out. The real reason he was there was to clear up another kind of doubt.

  “When your husband hung himself, what was the first thing you saw?” He stared at her, wondering how much sincerity he could expect. She must have read his mind, because she smiled maliciously.

  “His body swinging from a crossbeam in the living room and a pile of shit on the floor. It was still dripping from his pants. Excrement, falling from his feet. I don’t know why but he was barefoot. He’d taken off his socks and shoes, but not the rest of his clothes—except for his belt, which is what he used to hang himself.”

  Guzmán remained pensive for a moment. He wished he could have seen Olsen’s body before the police and medical examiners had gotten there and taken him down. Most people think committing suicide is easy, but they’re wrong. If they knew how hard it was, lots of people wouldn’t try to go all the way; they’d give up first. Hanging, in particular, is a process that seems simple, but it’s not. If you’re lucky, you break your neck. That’s quick and you almost don’t feel the pain; there’s just a snapping that you have no time to process. But if you don’t calculate all the variables properly—the weight, the noose, the height you’re jumping from—and something goes wrong, then you just suffocate, and it takes entire minutes of sheer agony before you die.

  He’d seen a “file” hang himself in a cell once. The man had used a sheet, but didn’t tie the knot in exactly the right place. For minutes the guy was flailing, kicking and swinging his arms in the air, just a few centimeters off the ground. Guzmán stood there, watching, dodging his desperate attempts to grab hold of him, begging with his eyes for help. Guzmán refused to give it. He could have lifted him up by the knees—the prisoner hardly weighed anything at all—but stepping in would only have made matters worse. That man had decided to put an end to his life, and he had no right to stop him. The poor wretch would have regretted it later, once his initial panicked fear passed, as soon as the unbearable torture and interrogations started back up. All he had to do was overcome that fear, the instant of absolute terror in the face of death. And then let go. As far as Guzmán was concerned, interfering with nature’s destiny is wrong.

  “Your husband weighed, what—a hundred, hundred and ten kilos? That must have been a really strong belt to take his weight. And it must have been very well tied to the beam. I can only imagine he’d have struggled desperately to get it off when he couldn’t breathe.”

  “What are you insinuating?”

  “That maybe he didn’t commit suicide.”

  “That’s what the police report says. You should consult it before launching into that kind of speculation.”

  “I have. From the time you found him until the time you made the call, over thirty minutes went by. The report also states that the apartment was neat and tidy and there were no signs of robbery or struggle, but the cleaning woman who came three times a week said in her statement that she found the drawers and the clothes in his closet jumbled and put back different from the way he kept his things organized.”

  Olsen’s widow looked away. Those beautiful, dead eyes. Shame, he thought. For a second they’d reminded him of Candela’s eyes, the first time she asked him if he was going to kill her.

  “I straightened up—drawers, dressers, the whole apartment—before I called the police.”

  The memory of Candela vanished.

  “Why?”

  “My husband always kept a large amount of money stashed in the house, cash and jewels. That money and those jewels went to a whole slew of little whores. He liked girls, the younger the better, and kept a reserve fund so he could satisfy his urges. I wasn’t about to let the lawyers hand those funds over to the creditors after the properties had been searched, so I looked everywhere until I found the money. It was a substantial sum, substantial enough for me to start fresh somewhere else. I don’t know, it was all so fast, and I was thinking a thousand things at once—that I’d tampered with evidence, that my fingerprints would be all over everything, that if they found me with the money they’d make me give it back or, worse, I’d be considered a suspect or an accomplice to murder.”

  “Can you remember anything else?”

  She looked pensive, as though debating something. Then she gave him a distrustful look.

  “You said before you were willing to pay for my ans
wers. About that check…how much are we talking?”

  Guzmán looked around with resignation.

  “I imagine it’ll be enough to throw a couple coats of paint on the walls and buy the lamps this place needs. It’ll be less than a defense attorney’s fees, true, but at least I might decide not to report you to the police for giving false testimony and absconding with frozen assets.” Guzmán had no idea how to say “son of a bitch” in Swedish, but guessed that that was exactly what she was saying under her breath.

  “While I was searching the apartment, someone phoned. I didn’t pick up, I let the answering machine get it. It was a man. He sounded very old. And very pissed off. He mentioned a recording and insisted that Magnus hand it over.”

  Guzmán’s eyes flashed like a flame being reflected on a dark surface. He could guess whose voice it had been.

  “That’s not in the police report either. Doesn’t it strike you as relevant?”

  “I told you, I never wanted to know anything about his business transactions and I still don’t. I erased the message. Are we done?”

  “Just one more thing. This will be the last one. The first time we saw each other, I mentioned that I worked for a man named Arthur Fernández. You said you’d never heard of him, and you almost convinced me. I admit you’re good at hiding your reactions; I suppose you’ve had a lot of experience. But you were lying. A tiny blink gave you away—you know, like when you open the window and a gust of wind rushes in.”

  Olsen’s widow stood up, decisively. She looked at Guzmán with an expression that said she was the kind of woman who made her own decisions and faced up to the consequences.

  “I don’t know who the hell you are or what you’re looking for. But we’re done. Pay me for what I’ve told you if you want, or turn me in; the truth is I don’t care anymore. I want you to leave and never set foot in this house again.”